Recruitment and hiring have always been challenging, but never so much as in today’s chaotic, post-pandemic environment.
That’s why internal recruitment has never been so important.
A recent story in the Harvard Business Review succinctly described the problem:
“More than 4 million workers are quitting their jobs each month in the U.S. alone. One reason is that people are increasingly reexamining what they want out of their job and career. In an October 2021 Gartner survey of 3,515 employees, 65% reported that the pandemic has made them rethink the role of work in their lives. For many employees, the result has meant leaving their employers for a new role elsewhere.
Unfortunately, most employees don’t think of their own organizations when they’re looking for a new opportunity. A Gartner survey of 3,000 candidates globally, conducted in May and June 2021, found only 33% of employees who searched for a new opportunity in the past 12 months searched internally first.”
There has always been a strong link between retention and recruitment, and far too many organizations have been focused on recruiting new people rather than trying to find ways to better utilize their current employees.
The emergence of the Talent Marketplace
Helping employees grow their careers has often taken a back seat to recruiting somebody from the outside. That’s a dangerous way to operate amid “The Great Resignation,” and that’s why having a robust talent marketplace has become an operational imperative for so many organizations.
What is a talent marketplace? Well-known technology analyst Josh Bersin describes it like this:
The Talent Marketplace is like a combination of career management, social networking, and recruiting system all in one. A hallmark of talent marketplaces is that they include features that help recruit talent (either internal, external, or both) for open positions and projects.
Bersin goes further, telling SHRM that the emergence of the internal talent marketplace is more than career pathing, employee development, or internal recruiting — it’s central to how we’ll manage talent in the future. He says:
“The talent marketplace represents something much bigger than HR. It’s the next form of business management. It will facilitate the evolution from the hierarchical model where you work your way up the pyramid to being an agile, creative, resilient organization where people work on multiple projects, move from role to role and embrace job sharing.”
According to a Gallup study, nearly one-third of people (32%) leave their jobs due to lack of career advancement or promotion opportunities – proving yet again that one of the best predictors of turnover is whether an employee has had opportunities at work to learn, grow, and advance.
In other words, helping your employees build their careers is critical in any short or long-term retention strategy. Yes, smart recruiting will always be important, but a bigger focus on retention is the critical element to truly building your workforce during “The Great Resignation.”
Building a better workforce at Fishawack Health
UK-based Fishawack Health is a leading global commercialization partner for the biopharmaceutical, medical technology, and wellness industries. Fishawack is growing and growing fast. They plan to expand another 2.5x in the next year. However, they face a big challenge because there is a small talent pool of highly skilled professionals to draw from in their very competitive industry.
To keep up with the competition, their overarching talent strategy needed to evolve. The goal was to future-proof their workforce by making sure that everyone across the organization had a clear path for their career growth. They wanted to enable and support career development and reskilling throughout the business to ensure they were attracting and retaining talent. They also wanted to increase the opportunity for internal recruitment and talent mobility.
They adopted an AI Talent Marketplace to be a central piece of Fishawack’s growth. As part of their overarching professional development strategy, Nick Holmes, Global Head of Career Experience, and his team are pushing to create a “super learning environment” where they put their employees at the heart of their careers.
The aim is for this to have a significant impact on Fishawack’s ability to attract and retain great talent. According to Nick Holmes:
Careers are experiences. Our mission is to provide every employee—from new hire to long-standing member—a personalized and purpose-driven career where they feel valued and have opportunities to progress.
This is where the power of retention lies.
A better way to retain your employees
Ultimately, retaining your current employees is critical in the age of “The Great Resignation,” and you won’t retain people unless you focus more on helping to develop their skills and showing them that there are relevant growth opportunities and a future career journey with you and your company.
A Talent Marketplace is a good way to do that, as more and more organizations are discovering. Fishawack Health have committed to creating better career experiences, and other organizations are jumping on board too. Trane Technologies, formerly known as Ingersoll Rand, are also using a talent marketplace to encourage growth and development and increase internal mobility. As a result, they have since seen internal recruitment rise from 38.7% to 55%.
Unfortunately, far too many companies have been recruiting people with only a vague promise of the advancement and growth opportunities that would come to them. All too often, those opportunities failed to materialize — mainly because the organization did not have a structured development system or a tech-enabled, AI-driven, personalized approach.
One more thing: Josh Bersin says that one of the biggest benefits of the Talent Marketplace is that it allows career growth to be everyone’s responsibility, not just the manager’s job. He points out that,
“(A Talent Marketplace) makes people aware of opportunities in the company and matches people to those opportunities; creates connections between project managers and people looking to work on projects; fosters professional development; facilitates teams to get more work done.”
This is the new approach to talent in the post-pandemic world and goes beyond the recruiting-centric approach that seemed to dominate so many organizations in the pre-pandemic world.
Want a smart tool to help you to not only battle but thrive in the era of “The Great Resignation?” A Talent Marketplace may be just what you need.
